There is a downside, however, as the worker...
on
Extreme Telecommuting
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· Score: 3, Informative
I forgot to add--while the above comment details some non-obvious benefits of a remote telecommuting force, there are some side-effects you should be aware of before deciding to telecommute from home.
I have been telecommuting from St. Louis to Philadelphia for over 2 years now. I've gotta say, full-time isolated telecommuting is NOT what it's all cracked up to by. From my own experience I've accumulated a good sized list of pros and cons of working at home.
I went to a guest architecture lecture (my wife's in grad school) recently where the (US-bound) speaker had collaborated with an architect in Finland for a particular contest. He attributed much of their success in winning the project to that partnership; they could work almost twice as much within the tight deadline over the other competitors, trading the work off as daylight reached the respective timezones.
My company has recently been working on a project in France which has had some of our workers colocated there. While it can be frustrating if you need answers (and they've already gone home) to have to wait until they wake up again, but OTOH when timelines were tight trading the development work back and forth more than made up for the overhead of communication.
IIRC, No Magic Inc. offers (or at least used to offer) Lithuanian Java/C++ programmers for hire. [And not only do you get the alternate-timezone benefit, but they were cheap, too...something like $25/hour (this was 2 years ago...I dunno what their pricing is like now).
It's certainly good to identify such problems and prepare for the ahead of time, but I'm not that worried about this. Science/Medicine are making good progress on preventing problems once they know about them (while IMO progress isn't as hot in the whole fixing-existing-problems domain). This feels like a readily-understandable problem.
By the time we're ready (socially, financially and technologically) to make trips to Mars with such frequency that this is a serious problem, I feel confident that a supplemental drug and/or exercise regimen and/or artificial environment will be available to prevent this problem.
The tech that creates a fake world could create either. But wouldn't it be easier to make one sub and a little surroundings versus the entire world?
Sounds good...except that you either have to accept the original story, that the sub is real and the city is not [because in the city Neo can bend walls and fly], or you have to include the entire world, sub+city, in the sim. Thus blowing to hell your reasoning above.
What's more, if the first-half city were real and the second-half city fake, it would be far more difficult to simulate the city and make it look&feel exactly the same as a real-world place, than to create an experience which was consistently VR.
Arguably any form of web-based installer violates this patent
Yup...but can you point to a web-based installer prior to 1998? People are all gung-ho on patent-bashing, but I think this is a combination of I-want-free-stuff ("free napster!") and hindsight-is-20/20.
I'm not necessarily defending the scope or righteousness of the patent system in general, but just because everyone is doing it today, and just because you use it frequently, doesn't mean it didn't take someone else's smarts to come up with the idea and introduce it to society. Zippers, shoelace grommets, post-its, etc.
"Can you believe it, someone has just patented STICKING PAPER TO THINGS!"
3: Longer batty life. Most notebook systems run twice as long with their backlight removed. If Apple combined a non-backlit (Game Boy style) screen with their already energy-efficient PowerPC chips, they could have the longest lasting laptops on the market. Since some people don't like reflective screens, Apple should start by selling 1/3 of their iBooks and Powerbooks with reflective screens, and the rest with backlit.
If you take any of the apple laptops today and turn the screen brightness to off, any sufficient external light source still allows you to see it. Working outside on a sunny day, you might as well turn it off, since the backlighting provides almost no benefit.
Probably the LCDs are not designed to capture and reflect light as well as the gameboy, but if you want to save battery and have the lighting for it, just turn your display 'off'. I do it all the time (500MHz Pismo).
But how do you account for the weird squared-off edges of his shadow? I was assuming the crops were because some other project was putting a bright light overtop, making it visually disappear.
When I saw the high-res image (the first one) and saw it was an array of projectors, I said "Eeeeuw! How can they get them all aligned at the edges well?"
When I looked at the 2nd hi-res image, and saw the color mismatch down the vertical center, I nodded to myself and said "Thought so. Bleah!".
But then I looked at that first hi-res image again, and noticed the bizarre shadow. Why is it all squared off? And then I realized--those projecters aren't just aligned at the edges, they're actually overlapping and registering correctly at 40dpi! Have you ever tried to get your company's LCD projector to project a reasonably orthogonal image? I can't get it even close. Now imagine getting two projectors to OVERLAP perfectly at the edges.
A lot of theoretical science is all about collaboration and sparking ideas through talking with colleagues. (My father-in-law is a theoretical physicist and visiting the Aspen center for Physics I was amazed at the number of chalkboards EVERYWHERE...in the halls, outside of offices, etc. They're there so that people can talk and collaborate whereever the idea hits them.)
If you look at the pictures, you'll see that many people can stand and discuss the high-resolution image together. Sure, it may be only 40dpi, but that's 20 million pixels that 5 people can stand in front of, talk about, walk up and point at, etc.
They suggest that we build a space ships/vehicles which 'operate at [their] natural frequency and use the energy this produces for propulsion.'.
TANSTAAFL. Sure, in a river I can conceive of harnessing the power of the waves/water by getting the boat to resonate with some frequency and then use that somehow to push the boat. (Having read the article, I'm still a little unclear on the concept.) But how do you use this in a (near) vacuum?
To get something 'operating' at its resonant frequency, someone has to be putting power into the system. I just don't understand what's supposed to be vibrating the space ship that's giving you the power.
Anyone understand this? Is it harnessing external sources, or just an attempt to make use of every last scrap of effort put into moving the boat?
To prove to yourself that this is a necessary improvement, go create a bitmap...
At the risk of being slashdotted, I've created such a file for you. It's a 2400x900@400ppi PNG file with the same non-anti-aliased text at 100ppi, 200ppi, and 400ppi. Opening it in Photoshop knows the file's saved 400dpi, but before you print it on your own in another program ensure that it's not about to print out at 72dpi.
In all reality, I don't really understand why such ultra-high resolution displays would ever take root in home consumer applications. Nobody has eyes good enough to utilize this invention.
Current monitor technology (particularly LCD) has certainly not reached a pixel density which surpasses human perception. People tend to run current (CRT) displays between 80ppi and 150ppi (and 150 is being generous...it takes a pretty darn high-quality CRT to be able to not have fuzzy pixels at that size).
Doing a little math (assuming a wide-screen 3:2 aspect ratio and 22 viewable inches) this screen would be roughly 18.3"x12.2", with a resolution of 3715x2477. This yields a density of around 203ppi...certainly not excessive.
To prove to yourself that this is a necessary improvement, go create a bitmap (not grayscale) image in Photoshop of some text and print it out on your company's laserprinter at 100dpi. Then create the same-height text and print at 200dpi. Stick these side-by-side on your monitor. Unless your monitor is farther away than most, you will find that you can certainly tell the difference, that the text at 200dpi is much easier to read, and that even then it doesn't quite look nice and smooth.
Text on a 200ppi monitor does have the advantage that it can use anti-aliasing to help simulate greater resolution, but in general more pixels as better (until you reach the limit of human perception). 1200dpi laser printers are needed because their dots are single-shade, and also the resulting displayed output tends to be held closer to the face.
Exercise for the reader--search the 'net to find the smallest-possible viewing angle that the average person can discern a dot. Combine this with the average distance of a monitor (a little over an arm's length?), sprinkle with trigonometry, and you should come up with the pixel density our displays should reach for.
The main reason I want this (and I think any other webdesig firm with a fast connection should have it) is to be able to simulate a modem between your server and your computer. It's a very different thing calculating that the page you've designed will take 50s to load, versus sitting there and interacting with a long latency, slow throughput site until you scream and decide to that maybe that Flash intro isn't all that important.
I'm definitely recommending that my company buy one--does anyone else have any tips on emulating various slow connections (other than buying various speed modems and using a separate ISP:)?
...character, motivation and plot are all kind of besides the point. the star of this movie is the occasionally-arresting animation...
What amazes me is that this movie was made, because the original was pretty much the same way. Terrible acting; the movie unsure whether it was a comedy or an action film or...or I don't know what; but the animation was excellent.
So if you liked the original, I assume you'll like the sequel...I'm just amazed that enough people liked the original to make this. *shrug*
Leaking details won't make these systems unworkable if they are any good. In fact it may make the copy protection schemes better...
Kinda like taking antibiotics ends up, in the long run, making those diseases stronger--the feedback loop (that they're not getting to reproduce) gets 'them' to generate a more powerful strain to beat the antibiotics.
It would be hard to do in a community of millions with underground spies and whatnot, but we'd be in fat shape (wrt to encryption; I'm done with the antibiotic analogy) if we could remove the feedback loop from our cycle. I.e. if they don't know that the encryption was comprimised, then not only will stronger encryptions not be made, but at the same time we'll have the backdoor at our disposal.
The upshot is--if you break someone else's encryption code in order to prove to them that it's not good enough, because you want it improved, then by all means spread the word, blare the trumpets, and alert media outlets like Slashdot. If however you don't want it improved, then (word to the wise)--shut up. Leaking a story about it, no matter how much it strokes your personal ego, potentially destroys all those accomplishments and starts the next round of warfare over, with the enemy a little strong this time.
Google indexes 1.3 Web billion pages on over a petabyte of storage--that's more than a million gigabytes. "That's not to say that the index takes up a petabyte..."
And what takes up all that size? You know it--pr0n. The storage size says it all...it's not a petabyte they've got there, but a pedobyte. Sick google bastards.:)
Adding light brings other elements into play.
on
Surround Lights
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· Score: 1
I don't know if I like this. When you're watching a good movie, you turn off the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and the stereo upstairs so you can get a good quiet environment, so that the sound added by the movie fills the void with an alternate experience.
You also turn out the lights, close the blinds and (for a really good movie) cover the electronics rack, because just as you didn't want any sound from your house impeding your experience, you don't want any sights from your house either. However, when you add external lights illuminating the room, you start bringing pieces of the room back into visibility, breaking your immersion in the screen.
Sure, it would be a little creepy to have the room glow red in the scary parts of a current-day murder-horror. But having a lightning flash highlight the picture of the family on the shelf next to the TV would IMO break the mood. Flickering patterns trying to match the flickering flourescent lights just end up strobing the fan and making interesting stop-motion shadows on the ceiling.
Now, make them surround holographic projectors, so suddenly Agent Smith is right next to you and you'll have something...:)
Alias|wavefront's PowerAnimator (and later Maya) use something quite similar, and very powerful. When you click/hold with a certain combination, (left+right buttons?) a "sundial" of choices (8 menu items arranged radially around the cursor point) appears. Moving over each of those provides a sub-sundial of choices around that spot.
The really cool part was that (like any good HI component) the menu choices only popped up if you waited long enough to need them (to refresh your memory), but the actions you performed gesturing with the mouse would take place if they weren't there. So if you knew that North-then-SouthWest was where you had stored a particular command, you could make this gesture with the mouse without waiting for the menu to appear.
On top of all that, the menus were user-customizable. Really, truly, a power-user's interface designed to make you as efficient as possible. And this was back in...1996? 1997?
Disclaimer: I remember this in Maya 1.0, which was the last version I used. I assume it's still in there.
If they don't want to port it, why wouldn't they leave its source to some generous Geek...instead of just abandoning it [?]
The fact that it isn't being ported to MacOS X doesn't mean it's being abandoned. It still runs on MacOS 9, which (for a year or two) is planned to be continued in parallel with MacOS X. So HyperCard still works (and works well) as a product under one of Apple's current OS lines.
I agree that Open Source is preferable to abandonment (except where the original product is being used as a foundation for the in-development next phase) but that doesn't apply here. Please wait until Apple abandons OS9 (and HyperCard along with it) before complaining.
Doesn't anyone realize what a support nightmare having multiple builds with the same build number would be. That's just rediculous.
Heh...well, I agree. But I don't necessarily expect that Apple would do things in a way that eases their support departments task. Look at the numerous versions of iMac or "PowerBook G3" over the years. For marketing reasons (which may or may not apply here) Apple has kept the name the same despite massive changes in architecture. (There is a Powerbook G3 with ADB and SCSI, and one with USB and FireWire.)
Not knowing what their internal build numbering scheme is personally, I don't find it so far-fetched to imagine that a feature-identical, source code identical build, but compiled with debug code off, would have the same build number. Particular when marketing pressures come into play.
This would be an outrageous issue if it were challenged in court and supported. It would be a worrisome situation if the school continued to declare that what it did was right.
But if you read the article, you'll be pleasantly surprised to note that, not only did the president of the school board basically condemn censorship in general, but also this is being used to review and revise how science fairs are handled:
"Janelle Albertson, the school system's director of communications, said the district is tweaking its handling of science fairs because of this incident."
"Stan Garnett, president of the school board, said the science-fair hubbub underscored two points. First, there's the First Amendment. "If people want to talk about something, it's very rarely appropriate for us to say 'no,'" he said."
People make mistakes. It's good for them to be called to task for it so that it doesn't happen again. But don't go running around yelling "the sky is falling!" because some bureaucrat was a dumbass. Especially not when the others in charge aren't supporting them.
I haven't tried the Hebrew Language Kit for MacOS personally, but I have coworkers who have used the Chinese Language Kit and been happy.
Best page I could find about Hebrew Language Kit is on the Apple Japan site (don't know why it's not on Apple.com).
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot to add--while the above comment details some non-obvious benefits of a remote telecommuting force, there are some side-effects you should be aware of before deciding to telecommute from home.
I have been telecommuting from St. Louis to Philadelphia for over 2 years now. I've gotta say, full-time isolated telecommuting is NOT what it's all cracked up to by. From my own experience I've accumulated a good sized list of pros and cons of working at home.
I went to a guest architecture lecture (my wife's in grad school) recently where the (US-bound) speaker had collaborated with an architect in Finland for a particular contest. He attributed much of their success in winning the project to that partnership; they could work almost twice as much within the tight deadline over the other competitors, trading the work off as daylight reached the respective timezones.
My company has recently been working on a project in France which has had some of our workers colocated there. While it can be frustrating if you need answers (and they've already gone home) to have to wait until they wake up again, but OTOH when timelines were tight trading the development work back and forth more than made up for the overhead of communication.
IIRC, No Magic Inc. offers (or at least used to offer) Lithuanian Java/C++ programmers for hire. [And not only do you get the alternate-timezone benefit, but they were cheap, too...something like $25/hour (this was 2 years ago...I dunno what their pricing is like now).
It's certainly good to identify such problems and prepare for the ahead of time, but I'm not that worried about this. Science/Medicine are making good progress on preventing problems once they know about them (while IMO progress isn't as hot in the whole fixing-existing-problems domain). This feels like a readily-understandable problem.
By the time we're ready (socially, financially and technologically) to make trips to Mars with such frequency that this is a serious problem, I feel confident that a supplemental drug and/or exercise regimen and/or artificial environment will be available to prevent this problem.
And it's a real word, not a sniglet.
Sounds good...except that you either have to accept the original story, that the sub is real and the city is not [because in the city Neo can bend walls and fly], or you have to include the entire world, sub+city, in the sim. Thus blowing to hell your reasoning above.
What's more, if the first-half city were real and the second-half city fake, it would be far more difficult to simulate the city and make it look&feel exactly the same as a real-world place, than to create an experience which was consistently VR.
Yup...but can you point to a web-based installer prior to 1998? People are all gung-ho on patent-bashing, but I think this is a combination of I-want-free-stuff ("free napster!") and hindsight-is-20/20.
I'm not necessarily defending the scope or righteousness of the patent system in general, but just because everyone is doing it today, and just because you use it frequently, doesn't mean it didn't take someone else's smarts to come up with the idea and introduce it to society. Zippers, shoelace grommets, post-its, etc.
"Can you believe it, someone has just patented STICKING PAPER TO THINGS!"
If you take any of the apple laptops today and turn the screen brightness to off, any sufficient external light source still allows you to see it. Working outside on a sunny day, you might as well turn it off, since the backlighting provides almost no benefit.
Probably the LCDs are not designed to capture and reflect light as well as the gameboy, but if you want to save battery and have the lighting for it, just turn your display 'off'. I do it all the time (500MHz Pismo).
Hrm...you may be right.
But how do you account for the weird squared-off edges of his shadow? I was assuming the crops were because some other project was putting a bright light overtop, making it visually disappear.
When I saw the high-res image (the first one) and saw it was an array of projectors, I said "Eeeeuw! How can they get them all aligned at the edges well?"
When I looked at the 2nd hi-res image, and saw the color mismatch down the vertical center, I nodded to myself and said "Thought so. Bleah!".
But then I looked at that first hi-res image again, and noticed the bizarre shadow. Why is it all squared off? And then I realized--those projecters aren't just aligned at the edges, they're actually overlapping and registering correctly at 40dpi! Have you ever tried to get your company's LCD projector to project a reasonably orthogonal image? I can't get it even close. Now imagine getting two projectors to OVERLAP perfectly at the edges.
Color me impressed.
A lot of theoretical science is all about collaboration and sparking ideas through talking with colleagues. (My father-in-law is a theoretical physicist and visiting the Aspen center for Physics I was amazed at the number of chalkboards EVERYWHERE...in the halls, outside of offices, etc. They're there so that people can talk and collaborate whereever the idea hits them.)
If you look at the pictures, you'll see that many people can stand and discuss the high-resolution image together. Sure, it may be only 40dpi, but that's 20 million pixels that 5 people can stand in front of, talk about, walk up and point at, etc.
TANSTAAFL. Sure, in a river I can conceive of harnessing the power of the waves/water by getting the boat to resonate with some frequency and then use that somehow to push the boat. (Having read the article, I'm still a little unclear on the concept.) But how do you use this in a (near) vacuum?
To get something 'operating' at its resonant frequency, someone has to be putting power into the system. I just don't understand what's supposed to be vibrating the space ship that's giving you the power.
Anyone understand this? Is it harnessing external sources, or just an attempt to make use of every last scrap of effort put into moving the boat?
At the risk of being slashdotted, I've created such a file for you. It's a 2400x900@400ppi PNG file with the same non-anti-aliased text at 100ppi, 200ppi, and 400ppi. Opening it in Photoshop knows the file's saved 400dpi, but before you print it on your own in another program ensure that it's not about to print out at 72dpi.
http://phrogz.net/tmp/res.png : (48.3k)
Current monitor technology (particularly LCD) has certainly not reached a pixel density which surpasses human perception. People tend to run current (CRT) displays between 80ppi and 150ppi (and 150 is being generous...it takes a pretty darn high-quality CRT to be able to not have fuzzy pixels at that size).
Doing a little math (assuming a wide-screen 3:2 aspect ratio and 22 viewable inches) this screen would be roughly 18.3"x12.2", with a resolution of 3715x2477. This yields a density of around 203ppi...certainly not excessive.
To prove to yourself that this is a necessary improvement, go create a bitmap (not grayscale) image in Photoshop of some text and print it out on your company's laserprinter at 100dpi. Then create the same-height text and print at 200dpi. Stick these side-by-side on your monitor. Unless your monitor is farther away than most, you will find that you can certainly tell the difference, that the text at 200dpi is much easier to read, and that even then it doesn't quite look nice and smooth.
Text on a 200ppi monitor does have the advantage that it can use anti-aliasing to help simulate greater resolution, but in general more pixels as better (until you reach the limit of human perception). 1200dpi laser printers are needed because their dots are single-shade, and also the resulting displayed output tends to be held closer to the face.
Exercise for the reader--search the 'net to find the smallest-possible viewing angle that the average person can discern a dot. Combine this with the average distance of a monitor (a little over an arm's length?), sprinkle with trigonometry, and you should come up with the pixel density our displays should reach for.
The main reason I want this (and I think any other webdesig firm with a fast connection should have it) is to be able to simulate a modem between your server and your computer. It's a very different thing calculating that the page you've designed will take 50s to load, versus sitting there and interacting with a long latency, slow throughput site until you scream and decide to that maybe that Flash intro isn't all that important.
I'm definitely recommending that my company buy one--does anyone else have any tips on emulating various slow connections (other than buying various speed modems and using a separate ISP :)?
What amazes me is that this movie was made, because the original was pretty much the same way. Terrible acting; the movie unsure whether it was a comedy or an action film or...or I don't know what; but the animation was excellent.
So if you liked the original, I assume you'll like the sequel...I'm just amazed that enough people liked the original to make this. *shrug*
Kinda like taking antibiotics ends up, in the long run, making those diseases stronger--the feedback loop (that they're not getting to reproduce) gets 'them' to generate a more powerful strain to beat the antibiotics.
It would be hard to do in a community of millions with underground spies and whatnot, but we'd be in fat shape (wrt to encryption; I'm done with the antibiotic analogy) if we could remove the feedback loop from our cycle. I.e. if they don't know that the encryption was comprimised, then not only will stronger encryptions not be made, but at the same time we'll have the backdoor at our disposal.
The upshot is--if you break someone else's encryption code in order to prove to them that it's not good enough, because you want it improved, then by all means spread the word, blare the trumpets, and alert media outlets like Slashdot. If however you don't want it improved, then (word to the wise)--shut up. Leaking a story about it, no matter how much it strokes your personal ego, potentially destroys all those accomplishments and starts the next round of warfare over, with the enemy a little strong this time.
And what takes up all that size? You know it--pr0n. The storage size says it all...it's not a petabyte they've got there, but a pedobyte. Sick google bastards. :)
I don't know if I like this. When you're watching a good movie, you turn off the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and the stereo upstairs so you can get a good quiet environment, so that the sound added by the movie fills the void with an alternate experience.
You also turn out the lights, close the blinds and (for a really good movie) cover the electronics rack, because just as you didn't want any sound from your house impeding your experience, you don't want any sights from your house either. However, when you add external lights illuminating the room, you start bringing pieces of the room back into visibility, breaking your immersion in the screen.
Sure, it would be a little creepy to have the room glow red in the scary parts of a current-day murder-horror. But having a lightning flash highlight the picture of the family on the shelf next to the TV would IMO break the mood. Flickering patterns trying to match the flickering flourescent lights just end up strobing the fan and making interesting stop-motion shadows on the ceiling.
Now, make them surround holographic projectors, so suddenly Agent Smith is right next to you and you'll have something... :)
Here's a link to the official movie website. (Not posting as anonymous because I am a karma whore. :)
Alias|wavefront's PowerAnimator (and later Maya) use something quite similar, and very powerful. When you click/hold with a certain combination, (left+right buttons?) a "sundial" of choices (8 menu items arranged radially around the cursor point) appears. Moving over each of those provides a sub-sundial of choices around that spot.
The really cool part was that (like any good HI component) the menu choices only popped up if you waited long enough to need them (to refresh your memory), but the actions you performed gesturing with the mouse would take place if they weren't there. So if you knew that North-then-SouthWest was where you had stored a particular command, you could make this gesture with the mouse without waiting for the menu to appear.
On top of all that, the menus were user-customizable. Really, truly, a power-user's interface designed to make you as efficient as possible. And this was back in...1996? 1997?
Disclaimer: I remember this in Maya 1.0, which was the last version I used. I assume it's still in there.
The fact that it isn't being ported to MacOS X doesn't mean it's being abandoned. It still runs on MacOS 9, which (for a year or two) is planned to be continued in parallel with MacOS X. So HyperCard still works (and works well) as a product under one of Apple's current OS lines.
I agree that Open Source is preferable to abandonment (except where the original product is being used as a foundation for the in-development next phase) but that doesn't apply here. Please wait until Apple abandons OS9 (and HyperCard along with it) before complaining.
THAN others. THAN others.
Heh...well, I agree. But I don't necessarily expect that Apple would do things in a way that eases their support departments task. Look at the numerous versions of iMac or "PowerBook G3" over the years. For marketing reasons (which may or may not apply here) Apple has kept the name the same despite massive changes in architecture. (There is a Powerbook G3 with ADB and SCSI, and one with USB and FireWire.)
Not knowing what their internal build numbering scheme is personally, I don't find it so far-fetched to imagine that a feature-identical, source code identical build, but compiled with debug code off, would have the same build number. Particular when marketing pressures come into play.
This would be an outrageous issue if it were challenged in court and supported. It would be a worrisome situation if the school continued to declare that what it did was right.
But if you read the article, you'll be pleasantly surprised to note that, not only did the president of the school board basically condemn censorship in general, but also this is being used to review and revise how science fairs are handled:
People make mistakes. It's good for them to be called to task for it so that it doesn't happen again. But don't go running around yelling "the sky is falling!" because some bureaucrat was a dumbass. Especially not when the others in charge aren't supporting them.
I haven't tried the Hebrew Language Kit for MacOS personally, but I have coworkers who have used the Chinese Language Kit and been happy. Best page I could find about Hebrew Language Kit is on the Apple Japan site (don't know why it's not on Apple.com).